A Centrifuge Study of the Influence of Dense Granular Columns on the Performance of Gently Sloping Liquefiable Sites

Performance of embankments on liquefiable soil deposits improved with with dense granular columns

“…The modal analyses were performed in the finite element program OpenSees (Mazzoni et al 2006). The properties of the different soil layers and the DGCs used in the finite element models were obtained from prior drained and undrained, monotonic and cyclic triaxial tests performed at CU Boulder (e.g., Ramirez et al 2018;Li et al 2018;Badanagki 2019). The analysis results revealed that for the conditions investigated, the fundamental frequency of the soil-column system in all mitigated tests could reduce with respect to the unmitigated case, BL, if all the embankment load was transferred to the DGCs.…”

“…Badanagki 2019) and a centrifuge free-field test performed at University of Colorado Boulder (CU) involving the same soil layers of interest in this study(Ramirez et al 2018;Hwang et al forthcoming) as well as the number of cycles to trigger liquefaction based on empirical observations of liquefaction surface manifestation(NCEER 1997). Calibration of soil parameters for the dense layer of Monterey sand (the 2 m-thick crust layer) and the 0.5m-thick silt capping layer was only based on the number of cycles to trigger liquefaction from previous cyclic simple shear tests in the literature (adopted fromKarimi and Dashti 2016).…”